Death by Asphyxiation
by Sienna
Summary: Wesley's POV set in Season 3 with hints of B/A


**Death By Asphyxiation**   
by Sienna 

RATED: R   
E-MAIL: sienna_tainted@email.com   
DISCLAIMER: Wes is not mine. Damn.   
AUTHOR'S NOTES: Wes randomness with B/A sentiments. I don't even think this is finished, but I'm sending it on impulse. Set in S3, after Wesley gets his throat slit by Justine.   
SITE: sienna.euphoriq.org 

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He has to wonder how things got so fucked up. He sits around his shadowy bachelor pad apartment hole and feels sorry for himself when it gets quiet enough, entertains malevolent thoughts towards some souled vampire, then feels repentant. It's all good to say what if or if I hadn't or if I could just but it doesn't change a single. fucking. thing. It doesn't change the rip in his throat or the cold accusation in their eyes. Most of the time, he doesn't even have to feel anything. 

There's the bottle, the comforting fog, the sugarsweet alcoholic maze. He puts it to his lips and sucks rich oblivion from its hollowed gut, an appetite for evisceration, then grimaces as it burns down his throat in retaliation. Always, always comes with a price. For a while, things were fine. He didn't have to pretend things were good, because they were. He was still paying for falling for that one. Fool. 

He remembers being so pathetically grateful for Angel's kindness, for his ready acceptance. He was needed. And now, now he feels nothing for Angel except a cold kind of indifference and an ugly, gnawing guilt. No. No, not guilt. It's mostly regret. 

He used to call her Anna. Anna with the unruly chocolate hair and pretty eyes. She was taller than him, too, by an inch, he remembers standing on tiptoe to cheat but she'd caught him and elbowed him in the side saying, "Do it properly!" with a laugh, pressing her straightened back to his again to do it properly. She was taller than him, so she would tease him when he'd get it in his head that he was tough. This was when they were barely thirteen and things were simpler, never mind how much he hated being young and powerless, because it was simpler than right now this second. Then Anna moved away and he didn't find anyone to replace her. 

Thinking about Annabel makes him think about Buffy, but only because they shared hazel eyes and a hard attitude that eclipsed soft, feminine forms. Thinking about Buffy makes him think about Angel, and the Council. He hasn't thought about Sunnydale for a long time, how he mostly just fluttered about not knowing what to do but hoping whatever he did would be the right thing, because the Council said it was and whatever they said was right. He'd be on the outside peering in, watching them act out a play. He made cameo appearances, and never really felt part of it for very long. But now it's different, because he is (was) one of them, and being one of them meant that it would hurt. He should have known, after all. He had seen those episodes before. 

Anna would sit on the grass with her chin on her knees while he'd fume about his father, never brazen enough to tell it to the old man's face the way he wanted to, thinking up hateful things to say that couldn't make it past his throat, stuffed and clogged behind the mutinous tears as the large hand raised to strike. She'd laugh and roll her eyes when he'd rattle on excitedly about the football team he would never join, the best game ever, the best penalty shot. The only thing he could never bring himself to tell her about was the Council. His Calling. 

She'd tried wearing his glasses once, blinking and squinting at the suddenly distorted world. 

"It's funny, how our eyes are so different," she said, handing them back to him. 

It's funny, he thought, how myopic I am. 

Things weren't so funny, these days. 

These days, the minutes were packed down with hurt, and hours were announced with wonderful little painkillers. He had to remind himself not to mix them with the good bottle, because then he'd be dead for real or his stomach pumped and sucked dry, and he didn't fancy either of those. 

He regrets letting them in too close. He regrets loving them, belonging. He shouldn't have let Angel hold him like that, so vulnerable within his inhuman palm, so easy to crush. He thinks idly that Angel doesn't care for his blood, but for the breath in his lungs. Choked, suffocated. Death by asphyxiation. It doesn't matter to Angel, as long as he takes it away. Twice now. Third time is the charm, they say. 

He loved him, sort of. He loved him because he was strong, because he cared, and because he was Angel, always pining woefully for love, so needy and brooding. But Wesley had been kicked too many times, locked in the dusty darkness for misbehaving, scrawled with too many scars, and he was always reminded that Angel was a vampire in the end, an animal who had survived too long and had to be put down. It was all just years of programming, but there was a part of him that had always hated being subservient. So invisible. So damned inferior. 

And Fred. So charmed by her innocence and beauty. He doesn't like to think about it. On top of everything else, still too raw. He did know how to be the strong one, for a while. When Angel had left them, he had easily slipped into the shoes of leader, and he was good at it, too. After Buffy had died, he made sure the days went by, that Angel was eating, that Angel boarded the freighter. And on one particularly rough night, he told Angel that Buffy was strong and beautiful, that she would be missed, and the vampire finally broke down and went away to deal with the missing pieces of his heart. When he came back, Wesley knew that he had found a way around the pain, a convenient kind of curative that he took to so well it was easy to put her death away. The lightness in his voice was too forced, his laugh too quick. 

But it was out of his hands. Angel no longer wanted to speak of it. Angel was no longer a part of his life, if he had any say. 

It hurt to laugh. He had caught himself, wincing at the twinge of pain in his throat, during an old rerun of Frasier. Muscles once taken for granted now making themselves violently known. 

The apartment was so silent, he could hear the footsteps outside his door, and knew whom they belonged to. He imagined that she was wearing gleaming red heels, she liked red, no pantyhose, perhaps minus the thong as well. A skirt or dress, because she liked to show off those long, long legs. He feels a pang of dull anger, then there's a confident knock. It's 11:43 in the evening, a balmy night with a greyish, waxing moon. Her arrival is so unexpected it seems almost too obvious. 

He ignores it, then contemplates letting her in. 

It doesn't matter. It's unlocked, anyway. 

-- 


End file.
